


Ineffable/Inevitable

by flibbertygigget



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Existential Crisis, Gen, God is Dead (ok not really), Morality, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 17:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19909384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flibbertygigget/pseuds/flibbertygigget
Summary: In which Aziraphale contemplates the morality of being a race of paper-pushers in the service of the ineffable.





	Ineffable/Inevitable

**Author's Note:**

> The lore about the seraphim is borrowed from a _very_ loose interpretation of the Kabbalah. I am by no means an expert on Jewish mysticism, so take it all with a grain of salt. I just liked the idea of Crowley, Mr. What Is Truth, being a former seeker of the divine who started questioning Her plan. Other than that, all quotes are from the book, but there's probably a good deal of TV characterization in here. I do what I want, evidentially ;)

_This Age wanted heroes._  
_It got us instead:_  
_carefully constructed, but_  
_immobile._  
_Subtle but,_  
_unfit_  
_to take up_  
_the burden of the times._  
_It happens._  
_A whole generation of washouts._  
_History says stand up,_  
_and we totter and collapse,_  
_weeping, moved, but not_  
_sufficient._  
  
_\- Tony Kushner, "A Bright Room Called Day"_

Aziraphale sipped at his cup of hot cocoa. On his lap was a rather handsome first edition of _Paradise Lost_ , but he wasn't reading it. Instead he was staring into the depths of his bookshelves and thinking.  
  
_"Haven't you ever wondered about it all? You know - your people and my people. Heaven and Hell, good and evil, all that sort of thing? I mean, why?"_  
  
Aziraphale had brushed Crowley off. It had been the Right thing to do, the Angelic thing to do. God's Plan was ineffable, after all, far too ineffable for a lowly Cherub-demoted-to-Principality to fathom. Then again, he _had_ contributed, in some small way, to stopping what ought to have been the most ineffable and inevitable Plan of all. Unless, of course, it had all been meant to happen. It was enough to make his head spin.  
  
_"And why did it happen, eh? I mean, it didn't have to, did it?"_  
  
These kind of thoughts were far more Crowley's area. He was a Demon, after all. More significantly, at least for Aziraphale, Crowley had been a Seraphim. Even before his Fall, he had been a striver - always trying to touch Her glory and always failing in a fantastic pillar of self-purifying fire. Crowley had gotten fantastically drunk once and confided in Aziraphale that the fires of Hell were an old hat by the time he'd felt them, that they were almost quaint compared to the absolute agony of destroying your own essence again and again in an attempt to reach the ineffable.  
  
Aziraphale had called it Sisyphean. Crowley had called it sadistic.  
  
And really, only a Seraph could have Fallen like Crowley Fell. Not through Lucifer's violent rebellion, not through any of the Deadly or not-so-Deadly Sins. From the way Crowley told it, he had been thrown into the pit for nothing more than questioning whether the impossible task of achieving Her glory was really worth the constant self-immolation. The Seraphim had been given boundless Wonder and Awe; Crowley had simply wandered off and pointed his powers elsewhere. In a human, that would have been called free will.  
  
_"I can't see what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil, anyway."_  
  
In an angel, though, such deviations from the Plan were unthinkable, or at the very least frowned upon. There was a reason for the paperwork, the meetings, the forms filled out in triplicate. They all served God's Plan, which was not only ineffable but perfect and not the kind of thing that you could let be messed up by a rogue Principality. It had only been a perfect storm of things - Aziraphale's rather distant posting, Crowley's ability to sweet-talk him into temptation, his passion for esoteric and rare books - that had placed him at odds with Her Plan in the first place.  
  
Once Heaven had sorted itself out of the aftermath, which would take anywhere from a few decades to a millennia by his estimation, Aziraphale fully expected to be brought up for retraining.  
  
But the point was, the _point_ was that he hadn't Fallen. Which was rather unfair to Crowley now that he thought about it. Having the consequence for questioning your eternal torture be slightly worse eternal torture while another angel mucked up the Plan while keeping his job and his bookshop seemed strange. If God had been human, Aziraphale would have chalked it up to the phenomena of parents almost inevitably stricter with their first children than with any of the ones following. But, God being God, he had to approach it as just one more ineffable decision that he really had no right to question.  
  
_"The way I see it, no one has to pull the trigger. Free will for everyone. Ineffable, right?"_  
  
"Free will," Aziraphale muttered, glaring into his cocoa. Everyone said that angels and demons didn't have it, that it was the blessing-cum-curse solely of humanity. But what was free will, really, but the power to break from the ineffable Plan? Eve had eaten the fruit, Crowley had questioned the Seraphim's calling, Aziraphale had sought to prevent Armageddon. He hadn't been all that important, in the end, but he had done it.  
  
One thing that Crowley and Aziraphale had always agreed on was that free will was a bugger. Crowley because it made the whole sowing discontent thing a bit of a crap-shoot, and Aziraphale because the things that humans decided to do it sometimes seemed horribly vile. How the heavens could something like the atomic bomb be part of the Plan? Crowley had laughed at Aziraphale's disgust and doubt, pointing out that She worked in mysterious ways and, anyways, the bomb was very little, proportionally speaking, compared to, say, Noah's flood. The ineffable Plan obviously cared little for the standards She had set for both angels and humanity, and as a demon he was glad to be rid of it.  
  
_"Funny if we both got it wrong, eh? Funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one, eh?"_  
  
Six thousand years was a rather long time, even for an angel. In his time on Earth, Aziraphale had seen the best and worst of humanity, Heaven, and Hell alike. He had seen countless times when the Plan seemed a bit confusing, a bit nonsensical, a bit, well, ineffable. So why was it that Aziraphale had decided to dabble in free will now? What had pushed him? Was it all part of the Plan, or was it something else?  
  
Angels, as a rule, were a race of paper-pushers. When given the choice, any angel, from the highest of the Malakim to the most inconsequential of the Ishim, would be ecstatic with a simple desk job. Stamping requests, filling out forms - paperwork was full of clear-cut Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. Even Aziraphale, despite the eccentricity that came from inhabiting Earth for millennia, was a creature of habit. He hated to see his routine disrupted and his books disrupted from their place. For everything there is a season, and perhaps only the Disruption to End All Disruptions could have shaken him from his complacency.  
  
Aziraphale grimaced. Complacency. It was a human word, a distinctly unflattering human word. Where angels sought to remain within Her Plan by behaving as they always had, forever and ever amen, humans celebrated the breaking of routine that resulted from virtuous exercise of free will. When he had chosen to try to prevent the End of the World, he had been in line with human morality but horribly against the angelic host.  
  
And yet he had not Fallen. What was he to make of that?  
  
_"You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say. There's Right, and there's Wrong. If you do Wrong when you're told to do Right, you deserve to be punished."_  
  
None of them had Fallen, not one. Gabriel had followed the Plan to the point of trying to execute him, while Aziraphale had gone so far off-script that the idea of being one of Hers was almost comical. So what was Right and Good?  
  
Aziraphale tried to look at it logically. Thou shalt not kill was a simple enough directive, given by God Herself, and yet Armageddon was more or less the ultimate murder. Perhaps that was what had saved him, the fact that even if he wasn't following the Plan he was at least following Her. But then, but then, what was the morality of executing _him_? Was the whole thou shalt not kill thing only for humans? The paperwork had all been bog-standard, after all. Nothing that hadn't been done a hundred times before.  
  
And what of Crowley? He hadn't actually _done_ anything before being cast out, nothing but ask a few slightly unprofessional questions. And the whole self-immolation thing - wasn't suicide and torture frowned upon on Earth? Was the desire for comfort, or at least not-pain, really Wrong, even for a Seraph? It wasn't as though an angel could match Her perfection anyways, and quite frankly constant flame pillars seemed like a questionable way to get there.  
  
Aziraphale looked up at the ceiling. This was Doubt. Angels had Fallen for thoughts like these, and yet there was no sign of Her smiting. Did that mean that his conclusion about the Wrongness of complacency was Right? Was he being Called to leave his comfortable existence behind forever, no matter how much he would mourn it?  
  
Or, he thought with a shudder, was this simply the end of an era instead of the End of the World? What next?


End file.
